© AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com. Review Article The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (2018) by Dipesh Chakrabarty Publisher: Oxford University Press (2018) Language: English ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948673-1 ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-948673-5 Reviewed by Shikha Vats Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi. Email: shikhavats.iitd@gmail.com W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) had famously said that the problem of the twentieth century “is the problem of the color-line” (p. 13). Dipesh Chakrabarty declares, in this new volume, that the question of the twenty-first century will be that of climate crisis. The major events of the twentieth century, including the processes of imperialism, colonization, and globalization led to widespread migration of people all across the globe framing new intersubjective equations such as oppressor-oppressed, privileged-marginalized, mostly along what Du Bois called ‘the color-line’. The major fallout of this colonial and capitalist project in the last century has been global warming which is set to affect the entire planet and hence needs to be at the forefront of all policy decisions in the twenty-first century. In order to grapple with this new age of the Anthropocene i , whereby human beings have become a geophysical force capable of altering the course of the planet, Chakrabarty urges a rethinking and reformulation of the discipline of history. The Crises of Civilization brings together a host of essays on postcolonial, global and planetary concerns. Most of these essays have been independently published before in various journals. However, they have been edited further to form a part of an evolving engagement with some key issues, which have consistently occupied Chakrabarty’s oeuvre. The volume follows a bipartite structure, with the first section titled ‘Global Worlds’ and the second section ‘The Planetary Human’. The first section highlights the heterogeneity of the ‘global’ worlds wherein the encounter between the west and the east happens in a big way, at first, during colonial rule, and later, in the form of almost a ‘reverse migration’ due to globalization. Chakrabarty, in this section, discusses the limitations of the Eurocentric thought ii , emergence of capitalism in the non-western societies within a different vocabulary from that of western modernity, and finally, the relationship between the anti-colonial and postcolonial thought through theory, friendship and literature. It ends with the chapter on the uses of utopian thought which acts as a bridge between the current and the next section, which is preoccupied with imagining a viable future in the event of climate crisis. The next section, then, includes Chakrabarty’s thought provoking series of essays Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Vol. 12, No. 4, July-September, 2020. 1-5 Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n4/v12n425.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.25